Scot’s Newsletter Blog

A new email package called Odysseus being developed by software design house Infinity Data Systems (IDS) is the new great hope for millions of Qualcomm Eudora users who were abandoned by the telecom company last year. Unlike Mozilla’s Penelope (Eudora v.8) development project, which is attempting to surgically graft Eudora-like functionality onto Mozilla’s Thunderbird email package, Odysseus is being rewritten from the ground up as the brand new successor to Eudora. It will offer cross-platform support for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

I spent a few hours earlier today reading through IDS’s Odysseus forums learning as much as I could about the company’s development plans. I came away very excited about IDS’s plans, design concepts, and goals. What I like best, in fact, is that while the plan is to start with a subset of Eudora features in the first release, the developers clearly know and love Eudora. Also, though, they’re not afraid to make changes. Eudora has been a hurting unit for several years — especially on the Mac platform, where some of the thinking has been quirky at best. The Windows version surpassed the Mac version quite a while ago and is more up to date. But Eudora in general is best thought of in 2001 terms. Some fresh thinking is definitely a good thing.

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I continue to test and either reject or approve Mac software for The A-List of Mac Software. The biggest change since the last issue of the newsletter is the advancement of a very hot disk utility to the A-List. DiskWarrior from Alsoft came highly recommended to me by several IT pro readers who manage Macs. They were dead right.

It takes a problem to be won over by a utility product. And that’s exactly what happened. The problem was a disk error that Apple’s Disk Utility was able to identify but unable to repair. There was no apparent problem with my hard drive. No symptoms. SMART checked out fine. It didn’t appear to be a physical problem with the hard drive, but rather a corruption of the data on the disk. I tote my primary machine back and forth from work everyday, and even though I’m extremely conscious of how important that piece of hardware is, and I back it up, well — there are few guarantees in life. And none of them is related to computers.

So, that was the problem. It took me a while to warm up to the $100 DiskWarrior because you have to boot it from the CD, and it takes forever to load. But it’s worth it. Because once up and running, DiskWarrior’s Directory tool made short work of it. Afterward, Disk Utility happily reported no problems.

The next disk problem will be a job for TechTool Pro by Micromat, which is also on the scheduled-for-evaluation list.

Some other notes: I guess I’m becoming more of a Mac guy. I removed Intego’s VirusBarrier X4 from my two most-used Macs. I think it’s a great product, and I’m leaving it on the A-List. But like most Mac users, I just don’t feel the need for this utility right now. I’m not making a formal recommendation with that announcement — just owning up to a reality. There are no viruses on the Mac. It’s possible there will be someday. But I’ll worry about that then.

I’m also adding a program to the evaluation list. It’s called Yank, and it’s another Mac uninstaller tool. I really love AppZapper, but it occasionally misses things that get tucked into out of the way places. When I uninstalled VirusBarrier, AppZapper left behind a context-menu item. Yank doesn’t rely on search to find files left behind when you delete the main program file. It creates a log when you install. What about programs installed before you installed Yank? Matterform offers a file-sharing service for sharing Yank uninstall scripts for specific programs that you can download and run. Not sure that’s going to be a big help, though. The first three programs I searched for weren’t there. Still, I like the idea of a more complete uninstall. Could be I’ll use both AppZapper and Yank. We’ll see.

I’m having some second thoughts about skEdit as a text editor. It’s still my preferred HTML editor on the Mac. But I may go back and check out TextMate again. It’s been very heavily recommended by readers who have written to me with A-List suggestions. Even more so than BBEdit, whose UI I’m not fond of.

After the April issue’s giant update to The A-List of Mac Software, the past couple of months have been a bit slower on the Mac software testing front. I’ve received several disk and system repair utilities that I’m playing with — including DiskWarrior, Drive Genius, and TechTool Pro. So far so good on those three. But more time is needed to fully evaluate them. (It just takes longer to run into problems on the Mac than it does on Windows.)

I’m also looking at software-launching and UI-shortcut programs, such as Quicksilver, LaunchBar, and Butler. I’ve looked at the first two, and so far, I prefer Quicksilver.

My only real gripe about Quicksilver’s basic program-launching functionality is that you need two sets of keystrokes to launch something. The first opens the QS Execute box, and the second launches a specific program. On the Windows side, there’s a program called ActiveWords that gets it down to one set of keystrokes, and I miss that.

So far I’ve explored only about 10% of what Quicksilver does, so I’m still working through the features and spending time with it. Next up will be Butler, which I haven’t even installed yet.

What’s wrong with LaunchBar? Nothing much was right or wrong about it for me. I just didn’t find it that convenient. Ideally, I could launch Safari by just typing “sa” at any time, anywhere — without having to initiate something or click anything with the mouse. Not only didn’t LaunchBar come close to that ideal, but I just found myself forgetting to use it. And when I did use it, it didn’t really save me time.

The A-List series has generated an overwhelming pile of email that I’m nowhere near finished sorting through. If you’ve sent me suggestions, please be patient. Not only are there a lot of messages to read, but looking at the software takes a lot of time. I’m going to be using the Mac for many years to come, and I’ve got a lot of great software suggestions to explore.

You could probably help by sending me only the one or two best apps you think I should know about.